Authors: Barbara Trapido
Noah moved his black leather swivel chair and his dentist’s recliner into a sizeable attic study. Ali began to prepare a portfolio of work for the local art school’s admissions committee. She collected Camilla from school in Noah’s motor car, occasionally drove out old Margaret for cups of coffee and illicit cigarettes when Noah wasn’t there, and continued her habit of lunching with him in the hospital canteen. Noah meanwhile bought himself a small Japanese motorcycle which he used for getting in and out from work – an innovation which caused Arnie to gloat without charity.
‘Where’s your sense of virility, Noah?’ he said. ‘How can you drive a thing like that?’ But Noah, indulgent from the strength of
knowing his virility to be bound up with Ali and not with modes of transport, made him no reply. They were at that moment undertaking a wintry Sunday walk with Camilla. Noah was not unaware that Arnie was right then wearing a girl Scout’s woollen cap. A Brownie’s hat. He had borrowed it from Camilla who had never been a Brownie since Mervyn Bobrow had flown into a fury at the very idea of his daughter joining a Christian-imperialist paramilitary organisation. She had acquired it in a jumble sale for one of her teddy bears. Now, some four years later, she knew in herself that the Brownies were soppy, but remembering how much she had once wanted to belong had given her a useful reserve of strength: she knew that if you wanted something which you could not have for long enough, eventually you lived your way through it. Time could heal. It could blunt desire. Right now she laughed at Arnie who was taking liberties with her stepfather.
‘You look like the wolf dressed up as Red Riding Hood’s grandmother in that silly old hat,’ she said to him. ‘You really do. Especially with your glasses on.’
‘I am the wolf,’ Arnie said.
Christmas was what Camilla liked best of all that year because Mervyn had always practically had kittens if she blew
Away in a Manger
on her descant recorder at Christmas time, and he had always insisted that Ali make Irish stew for lunch on Christmas Day. He said he liked it but really it was just to stop anyone else from having roast turkey. The year before, after he had left, they had had a small tree and she and Ali had stood it on the table and decorated it with iced biscuits and little German woodcarvings. But Noah’s idea of a Christmas tree was much more splashy and wonderful. Camilla had gone with him to the covered market where they had bought the biggest tree at the stall half-price because nobody else had wanted one that size. The man had helped them tie it to the roof of Noah’s car because Noah’s back was not so good, and they had driven home and staggered into the house with it. And while Ali was busy cooking they had
decorated it
entirely
in blue. Noah had asked her what her favourite colour was and she had said ‘blue’, so he had bought blue everything. Blue tinsel, blue aerosol glitter-spray, blue glass baubles and some lovely twinkly blue fairy lights that you had to plug in.
‘Gosh,’ Ali said when she entered, ‘isn’t it big? It looks like what the Norwegian government sends to Trafalgar Square each year. Why is it so blue?’
‘Isn’t it fantastic?’ Camilla said. ‘Isn’t it all yummy blue and sparkly?’
‘It’s certainly very blue,’ Ali said. ‘Come Twelfth Night you could recycle it as a moonlight stage prop for
Giselle.’
‘You don’t like blue?’ Noah said. Ali laughed.
‘On a second thought, I love it,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s a shock, that’s all, but who ever heard of a tasteful Christmas tree? It’s a contradiction in terms.’ Noah Glazer, guardian and guide, had saved her once again, she reflected. This time he had saved her from the snares of a Bauhaus Christmas tree.
The next day Camilla noticed that when the Egyptian cardiac man came to Christmas lunch with his wife, Noah, without any prompting, dissected the hot Christmas pudding to ensure that no taint of burning brandy would sully the Muslim half. The gesture touched her profoundly. She knew then for certain that getting married could be as good as in story books after all and that Noah and Ali would live happily together for ever after. That afternoon she went upstairs and began, in an empty notebook, to write an extended moral fable in which the institution of marriage, tried, abused and endured, was ultimately seen as most blessed.
Scissors!’ ali said from the driver’s seat of the Audi. The car had been Noah’s choice and was heaven to drive. Having sent off her husband on the train to Heathrow, she drove away from the railway station with her son in the back.
‘Dannie,’ she said. ‘He’s forgotten to take the scissors. He’ll have to open the cartons with his teeth – what a good thing he’s got such nice, strong teeth.’ All the men she had married had been endowed with first-rate teeth. Ali ran her tongue apprehensively along a row of capped and crowned incisors, then round to where an ominous proportion of steel and porcelain replacement molars hung on by bridges and buttresses to fragments of the original fabric. One day the whole structure would go down like a stack of dominoes. She would make it into the sear and yellow leaf with those galling, detachable teeth like old Margaret’s, living the while in fear of losing them down drains or in sticky macaroons. Or perhaps one would go out gnawing defiantly on hardened, toothless gums, slurping soup in restaurants with a napkin tucked in at the chin, one’s adult children hissing ‘Stop it, Mummy!’ in shame. But Noah would go on loving her as long as he lived. It had begun recently to alarm her, during his absences, that she would in all likelihood be required to face the dog-end of old age without him, since Noah was about to turn sixty, and the odds were that he would not make it to her eightieth birthday.
‘Stop it, Mummy!’ Daniel was saying, ‘It’s disgusting. Stop sucking your teeth like that.’
‘Sorry,’ Ali said. ‘Hey, Dannie,’ she said suddenly, ‘let’s go and eat something delicious in a caff.’ With Noah away, Ali’s frequent instinct was to propose forbidden fruit. Noah was wholly against sugar. He had no need of it. The more of it you ate, the more you needed, he said, and vice versa. Abstinence thus lent ease to abstinence. He had by this lucid persuasion managed early on in their marriage to put a stop to his wife’s twice-hourly munchings upon lemon curd sandwiches, but he had never really cured her of a weakness for Christmas mincemeat. He still came upon her in the pantry from time to time, eating it straight from the jar with a pudding spoon and knew now that nothing would cure her, short of long-term psychoanalysis or more cheaply, electrified pudding spoons. Some deep-rooted sense of privation had surely motivated this pleasure in sugar. He had at first thought it a reaction to the penance-and-cabbage-stalk existence she had led with Mervyn Bobrow, but surely it went deeper? There was for example the account she had produced for him once of the time Julie Horowitz had bought fifty-six marshmallow fish, thinking to cure Ali of an addiction by overexposure. Ali had laid them nose to tail along the length of the Horowitz swimming pool and had demolished them with unabated pleasure during the course of the afternoon.
Noah planned, this year, to make his wife a fortieth birthday present of two-score jars of Christmas mincemeat. He enjoyed making an occasion of her birthday.
Kneeling on a bentwood cafe chair, Daniel noisily gurgled up the last drops of his chocolate milkshake through a striped plastic straw. They were a heavenly pleasure to him, these stolen treats alone with Ali, dense with a great mass of love. And that night he and his teddy bears would share her bed because Noah wouldn’t be there. After the cafe they strolled together to a neighbouring trinket shop, hand in hand, where Daniel bought a plastic
lookalike banana with money advanced to him by his mother. He intended to trick Arnie Weinberg with it, who would make such a gratifying pretence of being duped by the thing. They dawdled idly home via the horses at the north end of Port Meadow, feeding the animals on sugar lumps previously filched from the cafe.
‘I went shopping in my pyjamas,’ Daniel said suddenly, as the realisation struck home.
‘It’s like going to bed in your clothes,’ Ali said. ‘Only the other way around. That’s what Hattie sometimes does, isn’t it? It makes getting ready for school much quicker in the morning. Oh my God, Dannie, school!’ she said. ‘I forgot. It’s quarter-past one.’
‘Silly Mummy,’ Daniel said with satisfaction.
‘Silly me,’ Ali said. ‘I’ll take you tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow’s Thursday,’ Daniel said. ‘It’s the ‘lection. Noah said.’
Back in the car, Ali headed for home.
From within the gate giving access to the farm which led to the house, Ali could see an unfamiliar car in the drive. One of its wing mirrors was making a reflective sunspot which focused with nervous brilliance upon the adjacent field. Ali came to a stop at her gate where she got out and released Daniel from his child-proofed rear door. The car belonged to Mervyn Bobrow, who had never visited the house before.
He had been gazing up at her house front as if to award it marks. Noah’s clematis, clambering prettily over the doorway in its May plumage, had lent its annual splendour to the small front porch. As he turned, Ali noticed that he carried in his hand a small snakeskin clutchbag for men, to which he had attached his ‘Men Against Sexism’ badge, in a double act of wishful avant-garde which caused her a lurch of antipathy. It was both curious and encouraging to her that this person by whom she had once been attracted now had an effect upon her akin to the scrape of chalk on blackboard.
‘This house of yours,’ Mervyn said, undulating towards her in his tight trousers, his teeth glinting like his wing mirrors. ‘This place! What a testament it is to your upward mobility.’ He revealed to her with the utterance how deeply he had caught his wife’s preoccupation with upward striving during the past ten years, but whether he said it merely to needle her, or whether to highlight his own much greater material advance in the intervening decade, she could not determine.
It seemed to her that the separation had been as good for him as it had been for her. Mervyn had attained greater status and greater prosperity. The luminous tiger and roll-your-own cigarettes had become things of the past along with the whole category of disadvantaged youth. The stilts appeared to be nowhere. He was backed, not only by his wife’s university salary and his wife’s inheritance, but by the royalties and fees from his impressively ubiquitous writings. Mervyn was in the process of metamorphosing from person to personality. He had become a man who looked for his name in the
Sunday Times
birthday lists and felt himself slighted to find it omitted. But not all things had changed. His trousers were as tight as ever. They reminded Ali of a recent piece of Hattie’s infant smut, got from her friend Rebecca. Tight trousers were like ‘a cheap hotel’, Hattie had said, because they had ‘no ballroom’. Once, after running into them in a cafe, Hattie had announced that the Bobrows were ‘posh’. This was a terrible insult since Hattie was strongly against all things posh. Poshness was taboo.
‘You realise that your next move will be to Boar’s Hill?’ Mervyn was saying. The remark caused Ali a tremor of nervous embarrassment. It was somehow pitiful that, living as he did, with a sociologist, he should read social cues so badly. Ali blamed Southend. There had often been times in the past when watching Mervyn wrestle with the British class system had left her glad to be both an outsider and a woman. If you came from a society where status was to a greater degree dependent on colour or caste you had no need to jostle so feverishly with the competition. You
couldn’t win anyway. If you were a woman you had no need to jostle at all. For all its appalling inequalities, such a system left people easier on the nerves.
Mervyn, by contrast, had never recovered from having passed into the grammar school elite a year early. He had written the eleven-plus examination at the age of ten and had been drilled for the intelligence tests by his schoolteachers in a small group of seven infant superbrains where he had become so proficient at them he could boast that ‘Intelligence’ was his best subject at school. Thirty years later Ali felt that Mervyn’s best subject was still Intelligence. Not humanity, maturity or good sense. He was all untempered IQ.
‘Eva and I thought about buying a house near here once,’ Mervyn said casually, as they walked towards the kitchen door. ‘We had our doubts about the local school. We felt that Lucy needed something
better.’
The local school, which Hattie attended, was a comfortable muddle where children messed with batik in plastic aprons and went on frequent outings to dig up fragments of broken china and old clay pipes from Victorian refuse dumps. In the afternoons the children exercised ‘Options’. Noah’s jaundiced belief was that the ‘options’ lay between throwing Lego bricks in the classroom and flicking water in the toilets. While the school’s good-hearted lack of academic rigour caused him periodic bursts of anger, it was defended loyally and zealously by his wife on grounds of egalitarian and progressive principle. Most of all she liked it because the other parents were all so nice. Not surprisingly the ethos of the place had driven out the parents of push and muscle and left the more relaxed among the species behind. The school had been an excellent source of female friends and had prompted a fruitful renaissance in this respect.
Mervyn and Eva, on the other hand, having given up their attempt to manipulate the state educational system to the advantage of their child, were now spending the rent which they derived from Ali’s old house on paying Lucy’s way through a
private establishment offering twilight prep at time-worn oak desks and multiplication tables chanted daily before the morning assembly. Fencing and Diction were charged as extras. It was gall and wormwood to Ali that Lucy Bobrow in consequence now read Jane Austen at nine and knew the date in French, while her own dearest Hattie read only large-print pony books and then under duress when there was nothing to watch on the television – but she would never admit to it. On the contrary, she had turned her own unease into an added zeal with which to beat down Noah’s misgivings. In this way she had always exorcised her own.